viernes, 9 de agosto de 2013

Those unexpected regressions...

A while ago, I read Ken Stark's delicious rant because of a kernel regression.

Ah, those regressions can be real bothersome in the world of FLOSS. Even so, I had never experienced one. Therefore, the whole thing remained pretty much an abstraction to me... until two days ago, when I found my original thesis presentation and understood the frustration of those regressions.

Let me explain. When I was a student, computers were not as popular as they are today, let alone laptops. Thus, delivering a presentation meant that you had to borrow somebody else's laptop.

Those were my Windows days. Although I had a desktop computer, my Microsoft Office version did not include PowerPoint.

Fortunately, my brother had won a set of CDs with a collection of programs that included some free software and demos. In one of them, there was StarOffice, which allowed me to create my presentation. When finished, I saved it both as an .sdd file and a converted .ppt file.

That was a long time ago. I thought I had lost the presentation forever, but I found an old CD containing only the original .sdd thesis presentation. Logically, I wanted to see it.

I had seen LibreOffice deal with .sdd files before, so, when I got the dialog asking me for a program to open the ancient presentation, I knew that something was wrong.

There was simply no way to open it.

I browsed the web and found that LibreOffice dropped .sdd files support since version 4.

So, there I was, with a document that I was dying to see and no software that could perform the magic to open it.

To make matters worse, it seems that OpenOffice can deal with the files, but I cannot install it without having an office suite dog fight on my modern Linux systems. It seems that the days in which I could keep OpenOffice and LibreOffice side by side are gone (last time I could do that was with Mandriva 2010.2).

Luckily, my wife's Asus Eee PC 901 is still operational and it comes with Xandros Linux and StarOffice! I used it to convert the file to .ppt and later to .odp.

Who would have thought that the tiny netbook was going to save the day?

3. Top 1 Rescue Distro:SimplyMepis! When something goes truly wrong, you can always count on this Linux distribution to rescue the system, get into the Web, modify files and make back ups. All that without mentioning it is almost easier to use than Windows ;-)